Every so often I get the chance to work on a project that means a lot to me and this one is definitely one of those. Every Monday Matters started as a book, written by Matt Emerzian and Kelly Bozza, highlighting an idea a week for ways to improve your life and the world around you. Think of the word-a-day calendars but this is is an idea-a-week, with things like Learn CPR, Thanking a Firefighter, or just Reading More.

The site has been growing more popular and looks like it will continue now that they have a weekly column on the Huffington Post and some other big sites are going to start running weekly posts as well.

From a design standpoint, I didn’t have much to do on this one. We started with the Revoltion Theme for WordPress and fixed some of the colors and layout. Most of what I did was on the programming end of things, creating the menus and helping to structure the site.

Here is a look at the home page:

For the thumbnails I used one of my favorite plugins, the WP Post Thumbnail plugin, which adds an easy to use thumbnail creation tool to the wordpress editor. As you create posts, you can upload an image, crop and resize up to three thumbnails per post. Once the post has these thumbnails, they can show up in different areas of the site.

You can see the small thumbnails on the home page:

A large square thumbnail show up for every ‘Mondays’ post on the Mondays Page:

And for the Campaigns Page, I used a large rectangle:

With one simple plugin, we were able to add some nice variety to the page layouts and introduce some color and life to a site with a lot of content.

The Every Monday Matters project is continuing to grow as we speak, with a soon to be introduced Community section for the more than 100 schools who will start using their Curriculum in the classrooms. Be sure to visit their site and find some inspiration for improving your life or the world around you – Every Monday Matters.